CTL BlogEducational Technology Updates from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The CoursePlus team is always working to improve the tools available to faculty, students, and staff in CoursePlus. This summer has been no different. In addition to some of the major, recently-announced features, here are a bunch of the new features just added to CoursePlus:

Quiz Generator: Students can now opt to hide the countdown timer on timed quizzes.

Quiz Generator: You are now given a warning if you try to add a question to a quiz where students have already started answering questions.

Drop Box: The total number of submissions out of all students in the class is now shown for each Drop Box on the main faculty Drop Box page.

Drop Box: The faculty and student main page views of the Drop Box have been reworked to be more mobile friendly.

Surveys: A unique, random identifier for each student is included on the Excel export of survey data. This allows for cross-referencing individuals across surveys without knowing the individual's identity.

Surveys: Responses to matrix/Likert scale questions are broken out into individual columns on the Excel version of the data. Previously, all responses for a single student were listed in a single column in the Excel file.

Portfolios are a great way for students to show the map of their intellectual growth in a degree program or even an individual class. An increasing number of accrediting bodies are turning to portfolios as a way for institutions to show that students actually learned what was set out in degree program competencies or objectives. Portfolios are powerful learning tools because they combine active reflection by the student, competency tracking over the course of a program, and display of evidence (files, links, projects) that show that the student really did learn what they claim to have learned.

Over the past year, a team in the CTL has been working with a number of programs at the School to develop a portfolio tool for CoursePlus. This new portfolio tool will be used by the incoming, full-time MPH cohort as well as the majority of incoming students in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology this year. A number of other programs at the School have expressed interest in using portfolios for their students and we expect usage to grow significantly over the next few years.

The portfolio is organized around touchpoints. Touchpoints are established by program administrators and are targeted towards specific events in the program. Touchpoints are made up of three key components: reflections, which allow students to reflect in writing about a specific event or milestone in the program; competencies, which show what specific skills a student can now demonstrate based on the activities the student discusses in their reflection; and evidence, which are files, links, or other documents which concretely demonstrate that the student achieved the competencies they say that they have achieved. Some touchpoints are designated as requiring review by advisors. When work is complete on such a touchpoint, advisors will then review student work and offer commentary and feedback. Students can add their own touchpoints to a portfolio, covering significant personal events in the program, such as an internship or activity not covered in a touchpoint created by program administrators.

As the portfolio places heavy emphasis on the achievement of specific program competencies, students have two ways of looking at which competencies they have achieved at any point in the program. The timeline view lets students page though all touchpoints in a portfolio and see what specific competencies were achieved (and at what specific level) at that point in time, along with the reflections and evidence for a particular touchpoint. The dashboard view shows a student all competencies in the program and the most current level that the student has selected for those competencies.

The Evidence Library is where students can store files or weblinks that are provided as evidence towards the achievement of specific competencies in their reflections. There are tools throughout CoursePlus that make it easy to send files from a Drop Box, wiki page, discussion forum post, or peer evaluation result to a portfolio.

Finally, students have the option to create publishing views for anyone in the world to see. Publishing views are targeted towards future employers, giving them an opportunity to see an officially–branded JHSPH page which lists the skills a student gained while in a program and the evidence which shows that the student can actually perform those skills. Students have full control over publishing views. Students decide what goes on each view, and students decide who can see each view. Students will have access to their portfolio and the publishing views therein for five years after graduation.

If you are interested in using a portfolio for your degree program, please contact Sukon Kanchanaraska, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Over the past few years, CoursePlus has evolved to serve the needs of courses offered not just by the School of Public Health, but by multiple divisions at the University. It is a system no longer specific to the School of Public Health.

On August 6, 2015, CoursePlus will make the move from the courseplus.jhsph.edu web address to courseplus.jhu.edu. While the servers and networking gear behind CoursePlus will remain in the JHSPH data center, and JHSPH IT will continue to support CoursePlus, the web address will change.

The change should be seamless for everyone. Everything will continue to work as before. However, bookmarks and links that point to courseplus.jhsph.edu must be updated to point to courseplus.jhu.edu instead. Bookmarks and links that point to courseplus.jhsph.edu will continue to work for six months after this change. After that time, courseplus.jhsph.edu will cease to exist and those bookmarks and links will no longer work.

As each academic year progresses, the listing of all of your courses on the "My Courses" page in CoursePlus grows ever longer. If you're faculty or staff, you also begin to see course listings for the upcoming year fairly early in the current academic year. Either way, this ends up causing a lot more scrolling down the "My Courses" page to get to the academic year listings you most frequently access.

CoursePlus will now remember when you close or open the course listings for an academic year between visits to the "My Courses" page. So if listings for the next academic year are getting in your way, you can simply close it and CoursePlus will keep it closed the next time you visit the "My Courses" page or sign into CoursePlus.

The previous academic year listing will remain closed by default, just as it has previously in CoursePlus, but you can keep it permanently open if you want to, just by clicking on the banner for that year.

Over the past few years, a handful of faculty have asked us if it's possible to set up wikis so that they did not become visible to students until a certain date, or if they could completely prevent any editing to a wiki after a specific date. We're pleased to announce that you can now do both of these things in the wiki tool!

Wikis with an open date will be listed on the main wiki page in a course but will not accessible by the students who have permission for that wiki until the date/time specified in the open date has passed. Wikis with close dates will also be listed on the main wiki page in a course but a student will not be able to access nor edit the individual pages in a wiki after the date/time specified in the close date has passed.

The new syllabus editing workflow for sections of a CoursePlus syllabus linked to the JHSPH course system is now live. This new workflow was detailed in this previous CTL blog post, but here is a shorter recap:

This workflow came out of the School’s recent accreditation cycle and will ensure consistency between what students see about courses in both the JHSPH course system and CoursePlus. This new workflow only affects the following sections of a CoursePlus syllabus: Course Description, Why Take this Course, Course Learning Objectives, Methods of Assessment, Intended Audience, and Prerequisites. All other sections of content in a CoursePlus syllabus are not subject to this new workflow.

The new workflow is as follows: you can edit any of the above listed sections as often as you like in CoursePlus, but changes will not be seen by students until you submit your edits to the JHSPH course system for review. Once you submit your edits to the JHSPH course system, you will not be able to edit these sections in CoursePlus until your submitted edits are reviewed as part of the normal course system change workflow. The review process in the JHSPH course system is usually handled by your departmental academic coordinator, and should take a few days, or less. Once your edits are approved, they will automatically be pushed to CoursePlus and visible to students. You can repeat this cycle as often as you wish, until two weeks after the start of the term in which the course is offered. After that time, no additional edits can be made in CoursePlus to the above linked sections.

If you have questions about this new workflow, please feel free to contact either CTL Help or your departmental academic coordinator.

We've made a small, but often requested, change to uploading files to a Drop Box: you can now see the file you uploaded immediately after uploading, on the same screen, rather than having to go back to the main Drop Box page to see the file that you submitted. It saves one click, yes, but it's much more convenient to upload a file and confirm that you uploaded the right file all at the same time, rather than jumping between screens.

Thanks to all the students and TAs who gave us the feedback that instigated this change!